Reviewing Luthier's roadmap

[jimbop]

Remember Luthier's roadmap? (As if you could forget with JG52Krupi's constant reminders... )

I thought it would be good to review the roadmap since the dev team has come a long way since release and I think this is quite good progress. Hopefully a new roadmap will be shared soon since I think this one is now out of date although for good reasons (i.e. a lot of stuff on it has been fixed).

1. Performance increase. Over terrain, the two things that slow things down the most are trees and buildings. We are currently in final stages of testing optimized buildings that almost double the FPS over London on a test machine.
Tree optimization is a little farther away. You will probably see changes in how trees are rendered, they’ll take longer to appear over terrain, but once again, performance increase should be significant.
If everything tests correctly over the weekend, both of these should be released by early to mid next week.

- Achieved. Always room for improvement but do you remember performance before the Kegetys mod and subsequent official patch?

2. Enhanced multicore support. The mode that we unfortunately were not able to finish in time is sending all render to a dedicated CPU core. The mode is working but somewhat buggy. It easily doubles the FPS, and the performance boost is especially noticeable in larger missions with lots of stuff going on.
This is probably at least two to three weeks away, and we will probably do a short public beta of this major change before it’s made live to everyone.

- Achieved as above, implemented in a patch (can't remember which one). Probably further room for improvement with dedicating rendering to a core if I remember correctly but still mostly achieved I think.

3. Multiplayer. There is something in steam filters that prevents game servers from being found. This is only happening with live retail versions of the game. This apparently isn’t caused by us – hopefully it’s just a simple oversight somewhere and the fix will be a simple flick of a switch.

- In progress I think. The specific problem referred to above was fixed but MP is obviously stuffed at the moment with the sound problem.

4. FM and ballistics. We have already addressed the issue where rounds appeared to leave aircraft sideways. This was caused by the difference between physical and rendered position of the aircraft, i.e. the rendered position lagged behind the actual aircraft position.
Our aircraft programmer has a huge bucket list of things to check, which he’s going over at a rather brisk pace.

- In progress but FM will always be in progress if IL2 is anything to go by. Quite right too.

5. Resurrecting SLI support. This is our next biggest priority; it’s done by the same programmer now in final stages of optimizing buildings. We are really hoping this will be a quick task, but I don’t have an ETA at this point. It’ll either be a couple of days, or a much longer undetermined amount of time if we have to submit versions to card manufacturers and ask for their input.

- Fail. This should have been fixed by now or at least a status update. I know that there are non-CoD profiles available that 'work' but I doubt these are optimal. SLI is just not optional in game development these days with many new since cards being multicore.

6. Bug fixes and support. We are reading this forum a lot and some Russian-language forums, and working very hard to address all issues as they are being reported.

- I don't know how to rate this one. Luthier, if you are reading the forum please leave a comment from time to time! Especially in the bug threads (Insuber's, beta bug threads) to encourage quality feedback otherwise these will inevitably degrade with less and less valuable input. Why bother going to the effort of accurately describing bugs if you think no-one is reading it?

7. New stuff – larger online maps, some new aircraft such as the 109E1 and E4 etc – are all in the pipeline too, but obviously we need to solve the bigger issues first and then deal with the freebies.

- Achieved with the new plane in the last patch but this will obviously be ongoing as well.

All in all I think the progress is quite good. My current major gripe is the lack of feedback from the devs rather than the rate of improvement. A formal recognised bug list would be tremendously useful for the community to build on.

If you want to post please try and keep the thread positive with comments on what you think the next roadmap should be in general terms (there are more than adequate existing threads for both bug reporting and ranting). Mine would be:

1. Online playability (sound and FMs)
2. Formal bug list for the community to build on
3. SDK and FMB documentation release
4. Offline playability (dynamic campaign or at least a decent set of static campaigns). Note that #4 would be assisted by #3 due to quality community development.